Erica 👻 🌲 📕
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rickirobin.bsky.social
Erica 👻 🌲 📕
@rickirobin.bsky.social
510 followers 380 following 700 posts
Writer, reader, knitter, sometimes organizer. Student of climate & shifting seasons. Contentedly discontent.

Ghosts of Distant Trees, Porphyry Press 2025

Denali National Park, AK.

Part of my heart lives in the desert.

she/her

ericarobinwatson.com
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rickirobin.bsky.social
Neighbor & I walked the dogs to the river. I dropped my phone in the snow chasing the dog to get him to drop a moose bone & was halfway home before I realized & drove back to find it. All my notifications are abt medical crises or the senate except for one abt bunco.

I’m not in the mood for bunco
The sun descends across a river, with ice starting to form but still plenty of open water. It’s steaming a bit in cold air.
November 10, 2025 at 12:54 AM
rickirobin.bsky.social
4 years with this weirdo today
A black dog with a white chest and paws sits in a frozen wetland, very demure, but it’s a lie
November 9, 2025 at 3:21 AM
rickirobin.bsky.social
Oh! This also happened last night.
Green aurora swirling around a full moon, photographed kind of shockingly clearly by an iPhone camera
November 5, 2025 at 10:40 PM
rickirobin.bsky.social
BREAKING: there is also an election in the Denali borough

(it’s a very quiet day)
Selfie of a white woman holding an Alaska with another white woman at the end of a long table in an empty room. They have election paperwork and crafts on the table
November 4, 2025 at 11:23 PM
rickirobin.bsky.social
gate is closed at kennels, road is walkable. We just walked a bit on the road after our po run today. There’s barely any snow, not skiable yet.

& I’m sure you know this but to others: there’s no trash or restrooms etc, be extra safe & pack out trash & be kind- anyone working isn’t getting paid —
Wide angle pic of a dog with questionable leash manners pulling on a wide road with a bit of snow
November 4, 2025 at 12:54 AM
rickirobin.bsky.social
Plz enjoy this picture of #OzzyofDenali photobombing my attempt to get decent headshots last fall
a wet black dog, head out of the frame, prances happily in front of a white woman with short dark hair attempting to pose against a fall landscape
November 3, 2025 at 11:54 PM
rickirobin.bsky.social
We are waiting for our baseball fan friend to pick us up to go to a masquerade, gathering that it’ll be a while…?
2 dressed up femmes in a house, in bad lighting, waiting for a ride
November 2, 2025 at 4:04 AM
rickirobin.bsky.social
It’s not my best work, but I really needed a nap 👻👻
A lighted pumpkin carved with two kind of janky ghosts
November 1, 2025 at 12:46 AM
rickirobin.bsky.social
The Nenana River: making ice sexy again
Some confusingly suggestive little bits of ice, under a spruce bough
October 30, 2025 at 3:21 AM
rickirobin.bsky.social
“Being Black in America means having a historical relationship w forgiveness…What happens when the performance of Black forgiveness gets repeated…until it becomes ritualized & transformed into tradition…?

“In the 21st century, how do we escape the theatre of forgiveness?”

-Hafizah Augustus Geter
The cover of Hafizah Augustus Geter’s The Black Period: On Personhood, Race, and Origin, held up by a light skinned against silhouetted trees. The cover features a black and white photograph of a Black woman and two Black children, bold yellow typeface, and two images of medals from Pen America and lambda literary.
October 29, 2025 at 8:20 PM
rickirobin.bsky.social
My friend organized a little Banned Books Reading at the community center (I read from Erika Sánchez’s I Am Not Your Perfect Mexican Daughter), knit a community hat (pattern by Calypso farms for donation to the Bread Line), &read my friends Simmons’ essays, which make me miss the desert. A nice wknd
A white femme stands reading a book, which she holds on a podium made from an upturned wooden crate and an end table. The room is lit by floor lamps and string lights A knit hat made from bulky green, rust, and gold yarn, laying in snow Simmons Buntin’s essay collection Satellite, sitting on a knit red and green striped shawl
October 27, 2025 at 1:01 AM
rickirobin.bsky.social
Dawnell isn’t the first early reader to use the word “ambivalence” to describe the book’s tone, but did drill down on what the ambivalence is towards: the sense of misdirected attention, perhaps. I’m still contemplating it, though I don’t disagree.
"This is the angular prose of a straight shooter. With an eye for industry politics and idiosyncratic rural characters, Erica Watson studies Alaska's most ubiquitous public face: Denali National Park. 'It becomes a story about gravel,' she writes with characteristic, no-nonsense flair. In matters of the park, as in matters of the heart, Ghosts of Distant Trees cuts through the hubbub and casts complexity with deliciously streamlined ambivalence." -Corinna Cook, author of Leavetakings and Permafrost is an Archive (forthcoming March 2026)
October 17, 2025 at 2:19 AM
rickirobin.bsky.social
We know Alaska is making national news when dipshit accounts like this weigh in with murderous nonsense
A screenshot of a reply from @greg-ess.com saying “Alaska is a red state and voted for blah blah blah” in response to the climate disaster unfolding in Indigenous communities in western Alaska
October 13, 2025 at 6:35 PM
rickirobin.bsky.social
A rainbow surprised me today
A wide densely forested valley with a visible cube of river, and a rainbow in the right third of the photo. In the distance, the sky is blue, which was surprising in the moment, but the surprise may be out of the scope of the photo
October 13, 2025 at 3:19 AM
rickirobin.bsky.social
Wants a govt shutdown bc more walks. Doesn’t understand how his bougie food gets paid for
A disconcertingly intense black dog lays on some knitting, eyes on the camera
October 1, 2025 at 1:45 AM
rickirobin.bsky.social
#Equinox meditation
September 23, 2025 at 6:21 AM
rickirobin.bsky.social
I am still having a weird time marketing a book right now, but words like Sean’s keep me in it. And preorders really do help, esp with small presses like Porphyry. I’d love for Ghosts to live on your shelf or dread altar or library.

porphyry.press/ghosts-of-di...
“Alaska has drawn many dreamers to its landscapes—Erica Watson among them. In these essays centered around her work in Denali National Park, she interrogates, with incisive criticism and vulnerable storytelling, the reality out from the myth. Hers is a frame that implores us to see the larger systems that have shaped and are shaping this place she now calls home alongside the intimate, sometimes contradictory details that give the park its beauty. These essays explore how climate change, political upheaval, and declining infrastructure connects us all, even in those places wrongly considered ‘distant,’ and they do so with a tenderness of attention and care toward the lands, creatures, and communities depicted. Watson wonders, ‘If mine is a love story,’ and yes, Ghosts of Distant Trees is, indeed, a love story, one that contends with the complexity, loss, and labor that comes with finding oneself entangled with something to which we know we cannot lay claim but with which we still yearn to belong.” —Sean Enfield, author of Holy American Burnout!
September 16, 2025 at 4:43 AM
rickirobin.bsky.social
I grew a carrot that looks like it has to pee
Small irregularly shaped carrots laying in snow, one of them split roots curled around each other
September 16, 2025 at 4:37 AM
rickirobin.bsky.social
Any #Talkeetna folks here?

I’m heading your way Thursday to read a bit on tourism and feeling weird about it, focused on Denali and Svalbard.

#AlaskaSky
Flier text: Erica Watson Only a Visitor: Tourism and Home from Svalbard and Denali Denali-based writer, Erica Watson, will share writing and reflections on tourism, sustainability, and belonging—drawing from twenty years of living at Denali National Park and an artist residency sailing in the High Arctic in fall 2024 (supported by the Denali Education Center). THURSDAY, SEPTEMBER 18TH 7PM AT SUSITNA HALL DENALI EDUCATION CENTER 22510 S Talkeetna Spur
September 14, 2025 at 4:47 PM
rickirobin.bsky.social
And SCENE
Snow covered spruce trees against a white sky
September 13, 2025 at 5:08 PM
rickirobin.bsky.social
A lot can happen between now & March, but for now, I’m looking forward to this conversation at #awp26 …which I was so hoping would be anywhere but the east coast, but I’m getting curious abt Baltimore
Writing about place at a time of rapid ecological and sociopolitical change can serve as archive, as elegy, and as resistance. Panelists will explore how forces and conditions including climate change, gentrification, and political upheaval reshape the places we write, informing the choices we make in writing them. We will examine impermanence as both subject and structural guide, and consider how our work allows a vanished past to gain permanence on the page. Speakers: Sean Enfield, Anna Cabe, Monica Macansantos, Erica Watson (moderator), Bathsheba Demuth
September 2, 2025 at 8:29 PM
rickirobin.bsky.social
Finally ventured out. Sound on for raging Nenana (and a dog shake off)
August 29, 2025 at 9:03 PM
rickirobin.bsky.social
Anyway…
August 29, 2025 at 8:14 PM
rickirobin.bsky.social
Oof.
The end of a gravel road is met by a rainbow in a cloudy sky. The road is lined by spruce trees and poplars, starting the transition from green to yellow. On the right side of the road, signs read “Dead End” and “no outlet.”
August 28, 2025 at 6:16 PM
rickirobin.bsky.social
I’ve been slowly poking away at the #glacierparkcowl this summer, and now it’s off the needles and ready for its season ❄️

Made with Poison Apple and Old Town Cobblestone hand dyed sock yarns I bought at Ginger Twist Studio in Edinburgh last fall, which was super fun to work with.

#knitsky
A gray and black knit cowl sitting on a spruce tree stump. The cowl is a 2x2 ribbing on the ends, and colorwork that might be thought to be an abstract representation of mountain peaks, sort of a Scandinavian feel to the aesthetic
August 24, 2025 at 9:45 PM